BySam Forgione, ReutersDecember 27, 2012

This March file photo shows the Netfilx headquarters in Los Gatos, Calif. Netflix users who were hoping to spend their Christmas Eve in 2012 streaming a movie or TV show had to find another way to entertain themselves after a Netflix outage hit customers across the Americas.

Paul Sakuma/AP/File

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NEW YORK — An outage at one of Amazon's web service centers hit users of NetflixInc's streaming video service on Christmas Eve and was not fully resolved until Christmas Day, a spokesman for the movie rental company said on Tuesday.

Netflix, which is based in Los Gatos, California, has 30 million streaming subscribers worldwide, of which more than 27 million are in the Americas region that was exposed to the outage and could have potentially been affected, Evers said.

Evers said the issue was the result of an outage at an Amazon Web Services' cloud computing center in Virginia and started at about 12:30 p.m. PST (2030 GMT) on Monday and was fully restored before 8:00 a.m. PST Tuesday morning, although streaming was available for most users by 11:00 p.m. PST on Monday.